Is this the Mother of All Languages? Astig!

Tolkien would have been fascinated.

 

Asian and European languages may seem diverse, yet could have been derived from a single mother tongue, researchers suggest in a new study.

 

The researchers in Britain cited a common origin for vocabularies as "different" such as English, Urdu, Japanese and Itelmen, UK's The Guardian reported.

 

In their study, the scientists discovered the languages spoken by billions of people across Europe and Asia may have stemmed from an ancient tongue in southern Europe at the end of the last Ice Age.

 

"Everybody in Eurasia can trace their linguistic ancestry back to a group, or groups, of people living around 15,000 years ago, probably in southern Europe, as the ice sheets were retreating," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University.

 

Spoken along the northeastern edge of Russia at least 15,000 years ago, the ancestral language was the basis of at least seven more languages that formed an Eurasiatic "superfamily."

 

In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers listed 23 words found in at least four proposed Eurasiatic languages.

 

Most of the words are frequently used ones, such as the pronouns for "I" and "we," and the nouns "man" and "mother," the report said.

 

Also with long histories were the verb "to spit" and the nouns "bark" and "worm."

 

"Bark was really important to early people. They used it as insulation, to start fires, and they made fibres from it," said Pagel.

 

But he admitted he did not expect "to spit" to be there. "I have no idea why. I have to throw my hands up," he said.

 

Superfamily

 

The idea of an ancient Eurasiatic superfamily of languages is controversial as many words evolve too quickly to preserve their ancestry.

 

Most words have a 50 percent chance of being replaced by an unrelated term every 2,000 to 4,000 years, the Guardian said.

 

Yet, some words last much longer, as shown in a previous study where Pagel's team showed that certain words such as frequently used pronouns, numbers and adverbs survived for tens of thousands of years before being replaced.

 

Computer model

 

In their study, Pagel used a computer model to predict words that changed so rarely they are likely to sound the same in different Eurasiatic languages.

 

They then checked their list against a database of early words reconstructed by linguists.

 

"Sure enough, the words we predicted would be similar, were similar," Pagel said.

 

Few verbs appear on the list, though Pagel said "to give" appeared in similar form in five of the Eurasiatic languages.

 

"This is what marks out human society, this hyper-co-operation that we do," he said.

 

Family tree

 

The scientists drew up a family tree of the seven languages, and found all came from a common tongue around 15,000 years ago but split into separate languages in the next 5,000 years.

 

"The very fact that we can identify these words that retain traces of their deep ancestry tells us something fundamental about our language faculties. It tells us we have this ability to transmit highly complicated and precise information from mouth to ear over tens of thousands of years," said Pagel. — TJD, GMA News